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AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

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Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#261

Post by lofaszvanitt »

awongh wrote: post #16

I think it's clear to me that AI will be both things: 1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around but- it will also be 2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the los…

The problem is, at the moment llms are not capable of proper brainstorming. And humans are quite shit in coming up with unique ideas. The great bottleneck is still money and dissemination of given product (marketing). So nothing changes. Just the usual capitalist thing where humans will be squeezed even further and revenue funneled from more entities to fewer ones.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#262

Post by littlexsparkee »

zemo wrote: post #7
Zealotux wrote: post #4

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

full disclosure I work at Whatnot but that sort of thing is a large part of the appeal of Whatnot to me, that people are showing off the stuff live on stream and you can ask questions about it

I applied there but the gamified, urgent dynamic of the shopping experience rubs me the wrong way, it's stacked against the user

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#263

Post by xtracto »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

I'm old enough to have programmed C in IBM/PC with the book Turbo C/C++ [1] at my desk side as reference, around 1993.

I remember at that time, my "mentor" suggested to memorize all the "keywords" from C (which were few). But given my bad memory I had to constantly look at the book.

Aaah how times have changed.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1601323M/Turbo_C_C

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#264

Post by fendy3002 »

animuchan wrote: post #203
gilleain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it interests me how much some people emphasise knowing facts - like dates in history or dictionary definitions of words. Facts alone are like pebbles on a beach, far better (IMO) to have a few stones mortared with understanding to make a building of knowledge. A fanciful metaphor but you know ...

This is an entirely false dichotomy though, is it not? One can both know facts and understand logic behind them, it's not like you're creating an RPG character and need to make a choice with limited character points. (Can't say time is the limiting factor either -- we're both in HN comments, valuing our own time at zero.)

I'm not an expert, however what I believe is brain has limited capacity, and old memories keep being deleted when unused after long time. It is impossible to remember everything unless you have photographic memory. It makes remembering facts like syntaxes challenging and most of the time useless, and keeping logic is better in the long run.

Let's for example about html boilerplate, where you don't remember the syntax. What you remember is the components & why they are needed, then add them one by one as you recall your memory. Doctype, html tag, head, body, etc. It works because html is simple and common.

Then for express it is harder, because you need to recall javascript syntaxes and express syntaxes, and most of the time you don't get involved with express outside req and res. You recall that express need body parser, register routers, and finally listen, whether you use http server first or directly from express. Now you compose one by one, looking at docs or web for the forgotten pieces, but you don't lose the understanding / logic of express, you just forget the syntaxes.

As for stream where I keep forgetting it, I just need to remember that stream need source, event handler such as on data, error, finish / end. Pipe if needed. However I never remember whether to use writable, readable, streamable, etc because I seldom get involved with them, and can look up for references anytime.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#265

Post by hansmayer »

embedding-shape wrote: post #165
hansmayer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> random JavaScript, C#, Java, Rust and Clojure "manually" Right, sounds very credible to me. What did you write, an addition function in each of those?

Lol, thanks (I guess?), but really isn't that hard. I don't think I know a single experienced developer who doesn't know at least 3-4 languages. I probably could add another couple of languages in there, but those are the ones I currently know best. Besides, once you've picked up a few language, most of them look and work more similarly to each other than different. From my lisp-flavored lenses, C# and Java are basic…

Well - that's the thing - toy calculators are easy on the "muscle memory". The operations and data types will be mostly similar in syntax across all these languages. If however you wanted to do something more akin to a real world example, using these and those frameworks... it would probably look different. I wasn't disputing the knowledge of multiple languages btw - some of us had experiences in languages from the times way earlier than C# and Java. The point is for real world work you wont quite do toy calculators and the people pushing for "AI writing all the code" are not worried about you retaining the "muscle memory" to write addition and substraction functions....

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#266

Post by jillesvangurp »

dinfinity wrote: post #252
jillesvangurp wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to not be fatalistic. As I was trying to argue, it's historically inaccurate and it doesn't actually change the outcome. Clinging to the past has never really worked that well. As for rich people, they get richer and richer until people correct them. Sometimes violently. The current concentration of wealth in particularly the US seems more related to political changes since about the Reagan era than to any rece…

> I try to not be fatalistic. As I was trying to argue, it's historically inaccurate and it doesn't actually change the outcome. This is false. Being fatalistic and 'panicking' can definitely influence and thus change the outcome. Your logic is similar to what is (incorrectly) used to dismiss the Y2K-problem, for instance: Looking back it seems like there was no need to panic, but that is only because a lot of people…

I'm wrong to not be fatalistic?! You lost me here.

A lot of people seem to be wasting a lot of energy insisting it is all going to end in tears because . All I'm doing here is pointing out that people like this come out of the woodwork with pretty much every big change in society and then people adapt and things are society fails to collapse.

I'm not arguing there won't be changes and that they won't be disruptive to some people. Because they will and people will need to adjust. But I am arguing that a lot of the dystopian outcomes are as unlikely to happen with this particular change as they have been with previous rounds of changes. I just don't see a basis for it. I do see a lot of people who want this to be true mainly because they are afraid of having to adapt.

> already incredibly unstable fragile world

There are a lot of people arguing that things are better than ever by most metrics you might want to apply for that. The reason you might feel stressed about the news is that dystopian headlines sell better and you are being influenced by those. That's also why the Y2K got a lot more attention than it deserved in the media and then a lot of people indeed freaked out over that. Of course a lot of that got caught up in people believing for other reasons we are all doomed and that the apocalypse was coming. And it made for amusing headlines. So, it got a lot more attention than it deserved. And then the clock ticked over and society failed to collapse.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#267

Post by luxcem »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

I thought the same but I tried to create a small Django project with APIs, small React frontend from scratch, no LLM, no autocomplete, just a text editor. I was surprised it was all still there after a couple of hours. Not sure it's a skill that useful today, it feels like remembering your multiplication table.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#268

Post by embedding-shape »

hansmayer wrote: post #265
embedding-shape wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, thanks (I guess?), but really isn't that hard. I don't think I know a single experienced developer who doesn't know at least 3-4 languages. I probably could add another couple of languages in there, but those are the ones I currently know best. Besides, once you've picked up a few language, most of them look and work more similarly to each other than different. From my lisp-flavored lenses, C# and Java are basic…

Well - that's the thing - toy calculators are easy on the "muscle memory". The operations and data types will be mostly similar in syntax across all these languages. If however you wanted to do something more akin to a real world example, using these and those frameworks... it would probably look different. I wasn't disputing the knowledge of multiple languages btw - some of us had experiences in languages from the t…

That's not how I understood other's experience to be, they're describing something that won't let them even write toy calculators. Selected quotes:

> But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff

> Played with these coding agents for the last couple weeks and instantly noticed the brainrot when I was staring at an empty vim screen trying to type a skeleton helloworld in C.

This is very different from what I'm (not) experiencing. My test was for if I can remember the basic syntax of the language itself, I was never a big framework user, so of course using a framework is about the least interesting test I could do of myself.

Instead, I did the bare minimum to see if my "mind has turned to pudding" or "instantly noticed the brainrot", which would have been visible even for a toy calculator, obviously.

> the people pushing for "AI writing all the code" are not worried about you retaining the "muscle memory" to write addition and substraction functions

What are they worried about then? From your perspective, sounds like they're worried about "using these and those frameworks" but that's far from "real world work" in my experience, and really the least interesting thing you could remember as a developer.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#269

Post by Planktonne »

mlcruz wrote: post #179
packetlost wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are AI “gains” really transformative They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context. Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but…

> we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context Trust me, this is a work in progress. Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space. Imo, What most of the people that are not directly working in this space get wrong is assuming swes are going to be hit the hardest: There are som…

> Trust me, this is a work in progress. Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space.

This is exactly what people were saying a decade ago when everyone wanted data scientists, and I bet it's been said many times before in many different contexts.

Most corporations still haven't organised and structured their data well enough, despite oceans of money being poured into it.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#270

Post by MattRix »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #228
randcraw wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more the role of the tool, the less the role of the craftsman.

If the tool is reliable, it's a win. Saved brain power doesn't disappear, it can be applied elsewhere. If the tool is powerful enough to do a better job than our brains would, it's a big win. In fact, we built the entire technological civilization on one such fundamental tool: writing . Or from another perspective: our brains excel at adapting to the environment we find ourselves in. The tools we build, the technolog…

I don’t think this holds for all tools in all situations. Sometimes the tools can do too much, especially when they start to do creative things.
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